Map homunculus (2014)

I think that this is generally bad advice. It results in worlds that feel more like a series of zoo enclosures than a living world. Cities built around this concept end up feeling more like an amusement park than a place where people live and work.

I think this misses the point that when we tell the story of little red riding hood, we still say that she walked for a long time in the woods. We just don't describe it in detail. It's still important that it be true, however as that is part of what makes going into the forest perilous. The same sort of thing can be implemented in open world games by means of various fast travel mechanisms. Ideally they should be sufficiently easy to use, such that that player is bored, but sufficiently restrictive such that the meaning of distance is preserved.

Movies like The Scent of Green Papaya and 2001: A Space Odyssey use this idea, but in reverse: the directors chose to have uncomfortably long sequences where the viewer notices that not much has happened in the last several minutes of viewing time, and it imparts on the viewer the desired sense (of loneliness, of boredom).

The Russian formalist school of literary criticism had terms for "story time" and "reader time": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabula_and_syuzhet

(2014)

Fascinating -- particularly the change in Ultima maps that I had never quite internalized. It's also interesting how analogous this is to real life, where attention to situations modifies our perception of time passing.

One of the most famous epics, the Odyssey, does this to great effect. Twenty years, and we are shown only the highlights reel.